


Mindterrors

by orphan_account



Category: Homestuck, MS Paint Adventures
Genre: Blood and Gore, Body Horror, Death, First Person, General awful things, Horror, Nightmare Fuel, Tags to be added as they are necessary
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-08-19
Updated: 2014-08-19
Packaged: 2018-02-13 19:58:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,193
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2163291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A horror-video-game esque Fic where you are the focus, trying to make your way out of this fresh new hell you've found yourself in. The trolls (including Ancestors and Dancestors) are all horrifying monsters in this nightmare and the Kids are broken tormented shells of themselves. Warnings for basically anything and everything under the sun, though I'll add the tags for them as they come up in the chapters, along with the characters. Feel free to suggest directions and/or monsters to introduce at the end of the chapters ! You are, after all, apart of this nightmare.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. It's only just Begun

It isn’t entirely clear when these nightmares began, but they’ve been coming more frequently, and lasting much longer. You’re starting to remember them more clearly. A large, empty room, with a second story balcony and two staircases. Innumerable hallways and dim lights, flickering. There’s no door to leave, you don’t have to look around to know this.

This night, as you fall asleep, you know it’s the same weird nightmare you’ve had for several weeks on and off, but this time, you’re there. Not simply seeing glimpses or flashes of this weird nightmarish place, and a creature emerges from seemingly nowhere, impossibly tall, limbs gangly and skin pale and thin, like paper. The face of this creature has no eyes, just a mouth full of crooked teeth that don’t look like they belong to each other, varying in size and shape. Yet, despite this lack of oculars, it seems to stare at you, the hands on its dark maroon clock face ticking forward in time, and then switching and going back. It’s irregular, and off beat, like its movements, jerking and sudden.

"YoU’VE MA DE it," The creature speaks, the ticks of clocks riddling the voice as its mouth moves. "WelcOME."

It bows, and you’re distracted still by the mere appearance of this thing.

There’s impossible wounds, dripping blood, chunks missing from its body, held together with wires pulled taut. Its feet don’t even match, and the monotone horns curling from the clock face like a ram are busted, but the pieces hover in place, suspended in time, occasionally falling only to rise again.

"Sssinner," It hisses, and you snap back to its face. "Ssoo sad, Loost LOST little thinnng. welCOME."

You ask it what’s going on, and it laughs, like dozens of clock chimes going off at once.

"YoUR SouL has beEN TAkeN. To get it baCK You, YOU! You despicabLE SLAUGHTERed lamB of LOST!" It bellows without finishing the thought, baring teeth and leaning entirely too close to your face. You can smell it’s breath, like rotting meat, and mothballs combined, and you choke.

"You must suRVIVE. This nEW PLACE. For sINners. AlL yOUR INJURies here wILL HURT YOUR REAL body. YOuR DEath will brinG ME TO YOUR SIDE. And i cAN Heal you. For promiSESsss yess."

You frown, concerned with what sort of promises it might demand, and how you would come to die in such a horrible place as this. When you ask, it laughs again, in your face, and it’s near deafening.

"youR liFESPAn. PROmissses oF YOUR YEARSSS. I bring you back, your wRETched shape, for YEArss."

That’s not entirely a delightful thought, but at least death does not have to be permanent for you, so long as you don’t make a habit of it. Who knows how much it would demand from you for your resurrection, or if you’d need it? You hope you don’t need it.

"To esCApe this plaa….ace.." The hands on the clock stop, momentarily, and the monster, with it, stops, sagging, blood oozing unchecked from its wounds and body starting to collapse, when it suddenly perks again, the hands back in motion, blood receding. "YoU MUst, faCE THE TRIaallsss yes… AnD AVoi d the lOST. OBLITERATE THE GUIlty, or FREE THEm from their bONDages."  

Somewhere, down one of the numerous hallways, comes an echoing bellow, and the walls tremble, the floor rumbles, and the creature scowls. “BeSSsst run, little siiinner. ThEY know yOU’VE ARrived.”

It’s gone like it hard appeared, suddenly blinking out of existence, and you shudder, looking at all the paths before you.

A staircase on either side reaches up to a second floor balcony with even more passageways, though the staircases are mismatched, one of them spiraling straight up, with missing steps, and the other sloping up over a long distance, like some grand entrance, with a landing halfway. The ground looked like it had rotted and collapsed there, though.

Only one of the passages has a glimmering light, a faint fuschia pulsing color, down beyond the bend of the corridor. The walls look damp.

The second passage you look at, is rectangular, and sharp, all angles when it changes direction down at the end, but it splits two directions, and it’s dimly light by flickering lamps.

The third, is small, and you’d have to duck to enter, though you’d rather not if you could help it; it’s pitch black, and littered with spiderwebs. A grate lays on the ground nearby it, the bars across it mangled, as though grasped and wretched from the doorway roughly.

The fourth passage you peer into, is normal looking enough, with carpeting on the floor and.. the walls. The sound must be muffled in there, but other than that, there’s nothing particularly strange.

The final you look into only briefly, the one where you’d heard the bellowing sound, and it makes your stomach turn to look down it. Cold, metal walls, a jarring change from the wood flooring, and stairs leading down, into the darkness.

You aren’t sure where to start. The rest of the passages are on the upper floor, and you’re not sure you want to navigate those precarious stairs just yet, though if none of these passages appeal to you it’s possible you might just try.

Best decide quickly though, that bellow had sounded hungry.

 

 


	2. Find A Light To Burn The Darkness

You inspect all your options again, about to just collapse to the floor and cry. What had you even done to deserve this? This has to be an elaborate nightmare. You’re about to settle to the ground when the roar echoes again, deep, and reverberating, and you’re immediately reminded why you needed to keep moving.   
The stairs spiraling directly up seem a good place to start, though, since whatever was making that sound seemed to be on the first floor.   
You cautiously step up the first three, but the fourth creaks, and caves out from under your foot, and you nearly gouge your leg on rusting metal if you hadn’t had a death grip on the railing that came away with your fingertips in chunks. The whole thing is rusting and falling apart, and you realize it’d be better not to try your luck any further, after your near miss with just one of the lower steps.   
The passages look all the less pleasant now that you’re reduced to only the bottom floor. There’s more, and you didn’t even bother to look at them all. And now you don’t get the chance to. You tarried too long in the massive grand entrance, and now along with the loud cries of god knows what, you can hear the heavy footsteps that accompany it. Thud. Thud. Thud.  
There’s really only one thing to do at this point, much as you don’t like it. At a jog, you retreat into the carpeted hall, only to find the sound is, as you suspected, incredibly stiffled. The floor feels spongey underfoot and gives easily, and the further in you go, the darker and quieter it gets. Following each of the twists and curves just leads you to a split, where the hall T’s to the left and right, into the darkness. Unsure which way to go, you take right. Right, must be right, right?   
This new hall way only goes a short distance before it sharply turns left, and opens up into a room too large to see across properly in this dim light. Almost immediately you backtrack and take the left hallway, and it sharply turns right, and opens into the same room. Or, you’re fairly certain it’s the same room. Like the first, this room has towering furniture in a rectangular shape draped with dusty white sheets. Or, they used to be white. Now they’re a dirty grey-brown in places and full of little holes, like they’d been eaten by moths. Some of the sheet covered objects have been toppled over, a little like dominoes despite their haphazard placement and angles, and you discover that, on closer inspection, they’re shelves. Bookcases, actually.

None of the books properly fit together when it comes to organization. Some of these books were damaged, covers warped or bitten or ripped clean off, and many of them were leaking pages onto the floor as the glue that once held them degraded and let them fall free. A book on dragons is found next to a book about how to build houses, and underneath both of them is a boring auto-biography about someone whose name you can’t make out through the deep scratches scoring the spine.

With no small amount of hesitation, you creep slowly onward through the maze of sheet covered shelves, heart thudding loud enough in your chest you swear it echoes in the room around you. The floor is still carpeted, and if you had to take a guess from the sound you weren’t hearing, the walls were too.   
It was too quiet to even hear the pin drop.   
  
However, you do hear something else. Something wet, and slick, plip, plip, plopping into an already soaked material. Plip, plip, plip…  
It’s too close for your own comfort, but you don’t run, like your mind screams that you should. No, instead your legs have firmly rooted themselves in place, and you turn around to look at what has crept up behind you in this grim library. It’s shorter than you are, but only because its back bowed so severely, head set nearly below its shoulders, which had a spike jutting from each, skin stretched taut over them. One had a hook, and the other simply curved straight up into the air. It was like looking at an insect.. And the longer you looked at it, the more insectoid it looked to you. Most of the body was obscured in knit together red lines, and at the ends that hung, they dripped the same red substance, leaving streaks down papery white skin.. You can see four arms under the hooded robe thing that dripped and made the noise you heard, and there’s something in it’s hands, covered in what looks like thorny vines… You jerk your gaze up, and its face had a cross-like seam in it, which you can only assume is the things mouth, and it opens up shortly after you look at it, revealing all the rows of pointy teeth along the inside of it, making a low clicking noise, and at that point your legs remember how to move.   
  
They can’t carry you quickly enough, it feels like, rounding bookcases and trying to shake the creature off your trail, though it kept catching up, or cutting you off, seeming to herd you further and further away from the way you came, until you find yourself cornered, breathing ragged, and you can’t think of anywhere else to run. It drifts closer to you, and you’re about to resign yourself to whatever tortures it might subject you to, when you feel a chill brush the back of your neck.   
You whirl around, and in the corner junction of the two bookshelves you’d been trapped against, you notice there’s a crack there. It’s almost wide enough, you’re sure, to squeeze through, if you hurry.

Suck it all in, squirm, writhe, struggle..   
It grabs your arm and it’s all you can do to keep from shrieking in pain, but you manage to jerk yourself free of its spindly fingered grasp, tumbling into the room you’d escaped into, bleeding from a wound it’s too dark to even see.   
Thankfully, though, the curious monster is too awkwardly bent and shaped to fit through the same space you had, and it drifts back and forth there, you can tell, by the faint shimmer of pale skin, hissing and clicking in agitation, hands clattering long nails together, occasionally prying at the book cases that concealed the way with frail skinny arms.   
It does not budge.   
The monster gives up, and you catch your breath at last, though you can still feel the warm wet trickle of blood on your arm, and you feel your way in the darkness, a hand clamped over the wound..  
It feels different from when you scrape your knee or nick yourself with a knife. This feels like a very precise incision, and the trickle of blood is very small, and there’s a raised lump..   
You shudder to think what it looks like in the light.   
Following the walls, you realize one wall is lined with nothing but shelves for as far as you can reach, most of them glass containers, and the room is small, as far as you could tell, with no other way out. No doors, no stairs, nothing..   
Panic wells up in your chest, and just before you were about to melt down, your fingers close around something cylindrical, familiar, with a button on one side, and when you press it, it flickers to life, dim, but it’s a flashlight.   
Panic turns to hope, and you shine the light to cautiously inspect your arm.

  
It’s, as you thought, a very precise little cut in the skin, but there was a little thread sticking out of your arm, broken, and that was what bled so. That thing had tried to pull the vein from your arm. You were nearly doomed to being slowly bled dry but a horrifying monster cloaked in what could only have been veins of blood, if this was anything to go by.   
Sickness broils in your stomach and you swallow down again the bile that climbed your throat.   
This is no time to be sick.   
The floor in here is stone, and the walls were too.. An odd change from carpeting. The glass containers you’d felt earlier were all filled with varying rainbow shades of translucent liquids with various.. Things.. floating in them.   
Some of them just held strange things, like disembodied broken doll heads, or plastic limbs, but others held what looks too much like real eyeballs, or fingers, and even a tongue in a few.   
A particularly large jar had a full brain in it, sprouting greenery from within, twisting roots sinking into the cracks of the grey matter. …. You tear your gaze from that wall. In the middle of the room, there’s a heavy wooden table, with a butchers knife embedded deep into it, and no matter how you yank and tug, there’s no removing it. That could have been useful in protecting yourself if you’d only managed to get the damn thing out..   
The far north wall had two metal plates bolted to it about an armspan apart with heavy duty rings hanging from them, and chains dangling from that, the bottom links hanging broken and the rest of the chain coiled in a useless heap on the floor.  
Whatever it was that had been trapped there was gone now, and it makes you nervous to think about. At least it isn’t in here… The eastern wall was blank, except.. What looks like a metal ring that you’d passed over the first time you’d felt over the room. Around it, the wall seems to have cracked a bit, or perhaps it was purposely done as such, in a rectangular shape from the floor. It’s just a bit shorter than you are, but pulling the ring reveals it is in fact purposely broken there, and the wall gives, swinging inwards and revealing a short passage to another door, this one wooden with a little barred window in it, which pale moonlight trickled in through. Freedom.   
You stagger through the door with your heart in your throat, practically running to it, so desperate after just a few minutes here to be free of this nightmarish place. This door swings outward when you push your shoulder into it, with a cacophonous screech of rusty hinges.   



	3. Delve Deeper Into The Depths

 

Near immediately your heart drops into your feet. Still trapped. The light came from a hole in the ceiling, far above you, rafters rotting and the section of roof collapsed all over the floor. It’s cold in this room, though, probably from the exposed sky. With this room at least faintly lit, you flick your flashlight off, not sure how much battery life you have to spare in it, or if you’d ever find batteries if it did decide to die on you, and plunge you back into complete darkness without any way to pierce it.   
Little roaches scuttle the floor around you, on the walls, the floor, over the rubble, and it makes your stomach twist, but they flee your approaching steps, at least, as you walk towards the middle of the room where the roof had caved in. There’s no way you’d be able to find a way to climb out that hole, so far away, but perhaps you’d at least find some comfort in feeling the chilled caress of moonlight on your skin.   
There hasn’t been any hints dropped as to what you’re supposed to do here, aside from face the trials. What trials? Did that nightmarish clock creature really expect you to face down each of the monsters here, or was there something else you were to accomplish, because you certainly hadn’t found it yet. Your arm still aches.. You should have found something to bind it, but it trickles with so little blood..   
Unless blood attracts the rest of the horrors here.   
The thought sends a shock to your pulse, and it quickens a bit, standing in the pale light from the roof, looking down at the bugs as they creep and crawl along the floor. If only you had raid.. Or anything, anything at all, to protect yourself, to better illuminate these rooms. As it is, the far reaches of this room are still dim and seem to shift with unnerving shadowy shapes that you can’t decide are machinations of your imagination or real threats. In this place, it could be either, or worse, both.   
There’s no such thing as a guaranteed safety in this place, and you wish you could simply wake up. Wake up, wake up!!! Ow. Pinching yourself had no effect at all, still standing there in the light with a roach scuttling over your foot that you stamp on, much to your own immediate regret as you realize both mistakes you made.   
Scraping the crushed bug off your smarting foot, you shuffle out of the light again, flicking your flashlight on to help illuminate the darker corners of the tall room.   
In the floor, there’s a trapdoor, which you can only imagine leads down into the belly of whatever the hell this building is. The cellar is likely down there. You’ve seen enough horror films and games to know how bad an idea that is, how it’s likely flooded with dark water, with aquatic demons waiting to drag you under and tear you apart….. …. No, no that’s not an option.   
But neither is going back the way you came anymore.. The door you’d come in from has vanished, leaving behind a smooth surface of the same tattered wallpapered walls the rest of the room was.   
Fear is starting to claw at the back of your mind, looking deep into the dark corners where shapes twist and writhe and seem to reach but never go past their hiding places, and you decide to explore the room in its entire, to dispel the uneasiness, or at least reveal what lurked there. Perhaps your death would be quick, and quiet, if you startled it into action. Though there may not be an ‘it’ there at all, and you may simply be overly paranoid. In this world, though, it doesn’t seem too unlikely.   
With slow, uneven steps, and your source of light gripped tight in both hands, you slowly approach one of the corners, trying to ignore the quiet scrunch of little bug carapaces underfoot when you stepped on a roach, though it still churned your stomach to hear them crack beneath your sudden weight on their small bodies. The closer you got, the further the shadows retreated, until at last all that was there was the junction of wall and floor all meeting together, empty, harmless. Nothing lying in wait, nothing to push, pull, or twist, just a corner, and a tiny hole that the roaches likely hid themselves away in or traveled to other places to.   
Disgusting.

After finding one corner safe, you find it much easier to check the other three, and they’re more or less the same. Empty, though the second corner had a stool that stood on worn legs. You don’t chance sitting on the thing, though, expecting it to, like the stairs in the room you’d started in and the room in here, to collapse beneath you and simply leave you sitting on the floor looking a bit dazed and confused.   
That just leaves the trap door that you’d decided was not an option at all the moment you’d seen it. For a long time, you stand firm by that notion, too, instead going back over each wall, prying at the wall in places where it had cracked in the hopes you would uncover another secret door, tapping the wall to listen for hollow places. As it turns out, the entire room sounds fairly hollow, and so you kick a hole into the wall at about waist height, hoping to see into another room, or down another hallway.   
All that greeted you were bugs, larger than the ones already patrolling the room, swarming out their new entrance in a wave of blackish brown.   
The retreat you beat is immediate, with a soundless scream in your throat and heart climbing up to join it there. At the rate you’d been going your heart might as well make permanent residence there, you think, as you slowly calm yourself down. Deep breaths. The bugs eventually settle back down again, most of the fresh ones you’d accidentally uncovered crawling back into their wall space. You should have listened more closely when you knocked on the walls, you might have heard their tiny legs skitter over the wood inside and saved yourself a scare..   
There seems to be no other remaining options, unless you were to very suddenly learn to fly.. or learn how to swallow your discomfort of those creeping crawlies and somehow teach them to carry you with their tiny bodies, flying you out of this horrible place.   
You’d rather face whatever is in the trapdoor than try to teach cockroaches how to fly a human out a hole in the roof. With that in mind, of course, this also means you have to face that damn trapdoor. There is no waiting around here forever; you’d starve to death, probably, or become bug food…   
The trapdoor resists being opened, as though glued shut, so you plant your feet on either side and grab it with both hands and pull with all of your might, grunting with the strain of it all, and it very suddenly gives with a loud dry crunch, sending you toppling backwards and practically slamming the trap door down against the floor. There’s a crusty green substance all around the edges of the entrance, cracked and flaking off, which would explain why the door was so resistant in the first place. It’d been sealed shut, though if on accident or on purpose you cannot tell. The same acidic green colored stuff trails down into the darkness, you discover, coating the rungs of the ladder that went down into the darkness. At least it looked fairly well maintained, and less likely to simply disintegrate at the first application of weight. Perhaps that green.. whatever it was would help reinforce it somehow.   
You cross your fingers and pray before descending down, flashlight in your teeth, though the further you went, the damper it seemed to get, and the more like moist ooze the slime on the ladder became, and more than once you nearly lost your footing, clinging to the ladder desperately while you regained yourself, and then continued on down. How much to this place could there possibly be? What had you done to deserve this sort of nightmare?   
There was probably something. Perhaps you’d eaten something particularly sweet before going to bed and this was some strange sugar-induced nightmare, or you had something stressful on your mind right before you’d dropped off and your mind was just playing on that. You’ll know when you wake up, because you know you will, this is only a nightmare. A very real seeming, very terrifying nightmare, but a nightmare none-the-less. There’s no way any of this is truly real.   
Feet on solid ground again, you let out a breath you hadn’t realized you were holding, shoulders sagging like they’d had a heavy weight lifted off of them. Though, this isn’t really the place to feel so at ease. You’re now, you assume, underground, and the ground has little puddles that catch the light and glimmer like mirrors, making it harder to see rather than easier. Barrels lay on their sides, stacked up in pyramids and kept from simply rolling away by metal posts jutting from the walls. There’s quite a few of these barrel stacks, actually, some of them oozing liquid you can’t quite identify, but the smell is strong enough to speak volumes where your eyes cannot. This is a wine cellar, or perhaps a moonshine stash, you have no clue for sure.   
There’s far less bugs down here than up there and for some reason that just makes you nervous. There’s so much water down here, and it’s so much darker, wouldn’t they be falling over themselves for this sort of location?

With no small amount of hesitation, you step away from the ladder, and the only other source of light is suddenly cut off when the trapdoor slams closed of its own accord, with an echoing bang. You thank whatever deities listen for the flashlight you’d found, or you’d have screamed louder than you just did, the tiny high pitched yelp of alarm and surprise. This nightmare seemed fond of making all your choices final, blocking you in to your decision to keep you from backtracking. At least nothing has emerged from the darkness yet… Yet. The thought makes chills slide down your spine like a drop of ice water, feet splashing quietly in the puddles of what you’re sure is alcohol now. The place seems to go on for quite a ways, with the occasional cluster of barrels stacked upright to the ceiling blocking out some sections like walls. Eventually, you hit a bare wall, that joined another to form a small room in one of the corners. The door is.. oddly vacant from the doorway you find in, with the places where the hinges should have been broken, as though the door had been quite simply wrenched off the wall. Inside, it looks as though the room had been overturned, with papers scattered all over the floor, and a bottle laying in shattered pieces along with it, staining the litter red. The desk that this had all presumably been set upon was completely turned over, upside-down, and the legs splintered and bent at useless angles.   
There doesn’t seem to be a damn thing useful in here, as you quietly peek into the removed desk drawers, finding wet matches, (they’d soaked in the wine on the floor and you’re a little afraid to use them), and several pens, though when you try them on your skin they don’t write. Dang. Though.. There isn’t really any dry paper you could’ve written on.   
You do manage to make out some of the words on one of the papers, and you scrunch your nose. It’s a love letter. Or a Confession of love, anyways, you’re not sure which exactly. Without anything you can make use of here, you leave the room, only to find.. There was a new liquid on the floor, with the old. Or, you think it’s a liquid. It’s awfully viscous, and sticky, clinging to your shoe when you step into it, and then starting to burn it’s way slowly through the sole. Eyes wide with alarm, you kick off the infected shoe, and it lands in the green ooze, and you watch it, with the dim light shining on it, as it slowly gets eaten up by the ooze all on the ground.   
Note to self, don’t step in the green stuff.   
  
That hadn’t been there earlier, though, so whatever it was that had made the trail must be near by, and the thought made your heart skip a little, trying to decide which way it had come from, which way looked more fresh than the other, and heading that way, past towering barrels, though the reason why they leaked all over the floor was becoming increasingly obvious when you saw the green slime that had managed to get on some of the wood eating holes into it, alcohol spilling out.

To your dismay you seem to have caught up to the thing, instead of run further away from it, as you carefully edge around green slime trails, eyes turned down to make sure you don’t have the misfortune of melting like your shoe had. Your sock is soaked and your foot is cold, but you’ll worry about the threat of infection from damp conditions later, because when you turn your gaze back up, you discover you’re not two feet from an almost glowing pile of green, moving forward at a snails pace, twisting horns inside the slimey shifting form still growing from the skull, and spine, and even disjointed bones of an arm. The creature continues on like it never even knew you’d arrived, the thin pristine white bones of the fingers in its green body reaching forward as if to help it move along faster than a crawl.   
  
Perhaps you could simply sneak around it, leap over the oozing puddle of its body and then run ahead, not worry about the green slime.. But what if you get cornered? You’d just have to leap over the smallest part of it, again, then, and dodge the green trail it left behind that shone with an unnatural light in the darkness.

It takes some doing to shimmy up close enough to try and step over it, and when you do, the skull inside turns to look at you with empty sockets and pointy teeth with no jaw, arm moving to reach for you faster than you’d thought it’d be able to and almost touching you.   
After that near miss you do not hesitate to bolt, splashing through puddles and trying not to slip when you turn the corner, foot sliding and hand grabbing blindly for the wall, or anything, really, to keep from hitting the floor. You hand swipes at air and you come crashing to the floor, scrambling frantically to your feet, and looking to see how close the monster that now followed you was now, fumbling with your flashlight and.. It had hardly moved to catch up. You almost want to laugh, the thing is so non-threatening now that you’d escaped its acidic ooze.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys! Remember how I said this was a sorta pick your own adventure jam? Yeah if you've still got the stomach I've still got the itch to write! At this point, your best bet would be to suggest a Character actually, instead of a Direction (though I'll also take Directions, we can always double back towards that acidic monster we just dodged ;) )


End file.
